Piotr Migdal

1,169 reputation

422

bio	website	migdal.wikidot.com/en
	location	Castelldefels, Spain
	age	27
visits	member for	1 year, 4 months
	seen	yesterday
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A PhD student in Theoretical Quantum Optics at ICFO. Alumnus of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Warsaw. Interested in quantum optics & quantum information, applied optics and mathematical modeling in psychology. Dedicated to education of gifted schoolchildren (as both tutor and organizer). In free time enjoys photography, hiking and psychology (esp. cognitive science).

	1,169 reputation	bio	website	migdal.wikidot.com/en	visits	member for	1 year, 4 months
422 badges		location	Castelldefels, Spain		seen	yesterday

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May 17	comment	How is intelligence correlated to beauty? And by the same author: Why beautiful people are more intelligent (free pdf). And as a side note, slides of my friend on that topic. There are also some links to paper investigating the beauty-symmetry relationship.
May 17	revised	How is intelligence correlated to beauty? link added
Apr 22	comment	Is there experimental support for John Perry's “Theory of Structured Procrastination”? @ArtemKaznatcheev Here it is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem - making haste makes it harder to come with a creative solution. It is not that unlikely that the converse is also true: to make creative things one needs to not rush so quickly and make his/her mind wander (NB which makes one unhappy, see scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-wandering-mind-is-an-un), where procrastination is a side effect (or perhaps not even - just a natural phenomenon in creativity, or (sic!) well-spent time).
Apr 22	comment	Is there experimental support for John Perry's “Theory of Structured Procrastination”? It may be hard to measure it, as procrastination involves mainly creative, open-ended work, as opposed to work than "can be done" [citation needed; I had it somewhere]. So, for example, you can say that X produces 5 papers, but Y produces only 1 paper in a year. But it might be hard to asses creativity or value of the papers.
Apr 11	comment	What psychological factors account for code readability? A related link, on eye-tracking when reading code: blog.theincredibleholk.org/blog/2012/12/18/how-do-we-read-code
Mar 12	answered	How to explain emoticons to an autistic person?
Mar 12	comment	How to explain emoticons to an autistic person? So, the actual problem is in explaining emoticons or emotions?
Mar 12	comment	How to explain emoticons to an autistic person? Two comments: 1) actually emoticons are explicit information, unlike someone smiling or showing sadness, so they may be not hard to explain 2) I don't think that people use emoticons in exact way (much alike facial expressions).
Mar 12	comment	Is variation in human brain size related to mental functioning? Usually what matters (at least - between species) is the deviation from brain mass as a function of body mass scaling law, see nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v305/n1/box/…. Without taking account for body mass (and other factors like age, sex or ethnic group) (so not only brain mass!) one might get misleading results for correlation of brain size and mental abilities.
Mar 12	comment	Autism: Social Skills: Body Language and Facial Expressions Even for the most common things in education it is hard to find "research proven" results, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science.
Feb 5	comment	Predicting how long a task will take More as a comment: Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel on Software and search for "unrealistic optimism" or optimism bias plus many delays are due to "unpredictable" problems, so you can't just include them in a schedule.
Jan 28	awarded	Notable Question
Jan 20	awarded	Announcer
Jan 18	awarded	Yearling
Oct 31	comment	Is Decision Making/Theory/Analysis applicable to game design? OK, I see. However, it that case there are many other psychological things - including feedback you get. So it's more in psychology of games and of learning, than pure decision-making. However I doubt if, from a general point of view, one can say something more than "it shouldn't be to obvious or too random, and one should learn something by reaction (of the environment or opponent) if the decision was good".
Oct 31	comment	Is Decision Making/Theory/Analysis applicable to game design? What do you mean by the decision making in game? Could you provide an example? But as a general comment, for practical issues in soft sciences most of the time practice beats theory. Maybe the latter can be an inspiration (e.g. I saw a paper on how to design a FPS level to make someone feel overwhelmed, when going back and forth in We don't go through Ravenholm in Half-Life 2; I cannot find it now though).
Oct 31	comment	How similar are human brains within the same haplogroup? And what do you want to compare? Different skills (e.g. verbal intelligence), different anatomy, different neurochemistry?
Oct 27	comment	What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent? @Jake It's not that unlikely that for some it's "so obvious, there is no point of writing a paper about it" and the others are not aware of that issue (anyway, it requires a certain proficiency in natural sciences), with not that many in between. But hey - maybe there is place for you to clarify. Are you writing a paper when you want to refer to material of the question that you asked?
Oct 25	comment	What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent? I don't know psychological papers on it. But well, it's fundamental stuff and the Nature does not care if psychologist know it or not. (Compare as if some guys used 2+2=5 claiming "hey, but there is no paper in our field disproving that".) I know some well more subtle papers (e.g. arXiv:1102.4101 when it is argued that a certain statistical relation in data-drive sociology is not necessary a power law). Also, I bet that most of mathematical psychologists know are very well aware of it. Sadly, I have doubts whether standard psychologists are enough educated.
Oct 25	comment	What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent? Now I'm away from may books, but it should be is something like "Feynman lectures on physics" or, if you want something more specific, look at dimensional analysis (there you see very well that also the constrains change relations drastically).